When the neighbors keep us up... we blog

Bloggerilio NHFR

Totally supposed to be asleep right now....there is someone near us having a Grad party, and I can not sleep, it's about 2:00a.m. I Blog...

Well, what has happened in the last few weeks?

We have moved forward in so many ways "DCTOC" I love acronyms!

....It's late and I should totally b sleeping.

All of a sudden change seems to be the norm....

We are potentially moving in the next year.

We are having our 4th child in September, a quick count...our one car already has 3 carseats in the back, no space for a 4th!

 So we bought a 8 passenger van, from a super guy in Abbotsford, Peter at Mission Motors...if you are looking for a used vehicle and you are on a Budget, give him a call!

 Just a Recap, In the last month or so....we have a new vision for recycling with our kids and a name change from Noah's art of Recycling to Noah's heart for Recycling...Business Plan change
To keep 50 percent of the profit and  for 50 percent to be given  away to Non profit organizations: We currently support: The Imani Orphan Care Fund, (they are raising financial support for over 200 orphans  in Kenya),The Cyrus Centre ( providing a safe place to transition youth needing to leave unsafe homes or finding a way to exit from the street life) Our new NHFR  logo (Sarah Mejia  http://sarahmejia.com ) Double Rocks!!( Our new website designed by  Josh Wall http://temp.joshuawall.com/) if you need a website he is your Man!!! he did ours in less than 2 weeks!!

 New Vehicle, new Season!

ideas ideas ideas

We're really excited about this recycling thing. We've got about $50 hidden up in the cupboard, one garbage bag of bottles by the backdoor that my sister gave to Noah as a Christmas gift, 6 cases of empty pop cans that we found on the side of the road when we were driving one day (all organized nicely but abandoned... weird), and 5 boxes full of random... I mean well sorted (by Adam and Noah without any supervision) cans, water bottles, beer bottles and other recyclable items. The web site is still not up.. we're not sure what to do .. it's ready, but how and who and ... that sort of thing. Noah and Adam are still collecting. So are we. Sometimes Joel and I stay up late at night and just talk.. what if we could collect 100,000 bottles in one year? What if this idea went across Canada? What if our friends in the states said, "hey... great idea. I'd like to donate my bottles. What do I do??" ... what would we do? Ideas are fun, especially when they aren't forced - like this one. It just happened and continues to happen.

We've been talking about different things to do with the money that comes in. So with everything we've collected so far, you'd think Adam and Noah would love to just buy lego guys and firetrucks and remote control cars with it (monster truck remote control cars) but they are totally ok with giving the money away. Well, to be honest, they don't really know what money - or numbers - are. Adam, when talking about his shoe size, called it "so big it's 5 dollars" .. . ah... something tells me he's not totally getting the money thing. However, they understand what it means to help people, and they really do want to help. If you ask them why they recycle, they'll tell you it's for people who don't have food or homes. Stuff like that. So we got to thinking - what should our first project be. Well, we decided to get personal with it. When Adam was born, he was only 26 weeks old and had to spend 110 days in 3 different hospitals. Vancouver Children's was a place that Adam spent some critical time in. So we were thinking - what if we could give back through Noah's Art of Recycling? So we set a goal to give $500 in 2011 to their Special Care Nursery (this special care nursery is specifically for premature and problematic infants). So that's where we're at with all this recycling biz. Got some bottles?

it all begins somewhere

Tonight Joel is at a hockey game and I (Heidi) am at home working on the web site. Joel doesn't know, but he'll be really happy when he sees it. . . at least I hope so. We have no idea where this bottle thing might go. The web site isn't up, but that doesn't really matter. The kids keep collecting bottles and we keep talking about people who don't have money and they get it.. sort of. They get really sad when they see a guy on the street with a sign. The other day they mistook a lady holding a "Ceasar's Pizza" ad sign for a homeless person, but at least their eyes are open. I was going to say that it must be hard for kids to fathom homelessness or real poverty, but the reality is, it's hard for me too. I have no idea what it's like to sleep on the streets. One night I arrived at my brother's house before he did. I had my jacket and backpack and had to sit outside in the cold for an hour. I had no keys, no phone, no way to contact them or anyone... that's about the closest it gets for me. I've never even been close to homeless. Camping is often even something that I complain is too difficult and uncomfortable. Anyway, this isn't about me, it's about a journey we are on. The garage keeps filling with bottles. Our car keeps filling with bottles. Today we collected a milk container, two water bottles and one juice bottle on our walk. We dream about giving thousands of dollars to charities, but for now we're probably at ten's of dollars, which is fine. The biggest deal is that our kids have something they are passionate about and we are running with it and supporting them, as well as teaching them AND learning a lot ourselves. A friend has given us a trailer to pick up bottles... now our car needs a hitch and we need a place to put a trailer. We're working on ideas of how to store pop bottles. We're talking about having friends and businesses donate bottles and we pick them up one Saturday each month. We know a small town that has no place to recycle and in the summer when the highschool grad class quits their recycling fundraiser, everyone starts throwing their recyclables away. We want to go there next summer with our new hitch and trailer. We'll see where the journey takes us. For now, it's enough to begin.